Your Guide to This Year's Mayhem Fest

Last week, I told you all about the Summer Slaughter Tour which blew through the House of Blues this past Saturday, and alluded to the numerous metal tours still to come up. Well, you may have just had your ass kicked last weekend, but it's already time for another one. This weekend's fest is the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival, or more simply Mayhem Fest.

The long-running tour features a much bigger and more populist lineup than Summer Slaughter's niche metalcore, but even then it might leave you in the dust with the amount of names and various styles. That's why I'm once again here to help and provide you with all you need to know about Saturday's headbanging madness.

Scorpion Child
Scorpion Child is an Austin band that recently signed with Nuclear Blast Records and will headline this year's Sumerian Records stage. They sound a whole lot like Led Zeppelin by way of David Coverdale, and sing about hard living and hard women. For the classic rocker, this is the perfect young band to restore your faith.

Motionless in White
Motionless in White spend a lot of time worrying about appearances in comparison with most metal these days, but if you're a fan of the gothic industrial metal of early Marilyn Manson, you'll probably dig them pretty hard. They're a fair bit better than Manson these days anyway.

Born of Osiris
For all of you out there who didn't get enough of technical and progressive death metal at Summer Slaughter, meet your Mayhem Fest favorite: Born of Osiris, which combines brutal deathcore riffs with synths and extreme technicality to create a perfectly deranged fusion that will satisfy fans of any of those traits.

Emmure
Though often compared to Limp Bizkit, Emmure is actually a lot closer to the roots of metalcore, when it was a whole lot more emo and angry. Despite the band's badass posturing, most of their lyrics perfectly express teenage angst and heartache. They also just have a lot of fun breakdowns, so if you're down for that, you'll be down for Emmure.

Children of Bodom
Though often criticized for incorporating power-metal and neoclassical influences, as well as some pretty bad lyrics (they have an album called Blooddrunk), Children of Bodom remain one of the most important extreme metal bands around.

It's not often a band featuring screaming and guitar sweeps ends up charting at No. 22 on Billboard, after all. If guitar solos are your thing, you also cannot go wrong with front man/guitarist Alexi Laiho, whose technical prowess practically overshadows his band's songwriting.

Job For a Cowboy
Job For a Cowboy will always be most known for having pretty much invented the metal subgenre of deathcore, but they've worked hard to make a name for themselves over the years amongst their legion of imitators. Today they're one of the best-known and most beloved pure death-metal bands around, having stripped away much of the "core" from their sound.